Published: 2019-04-26, by Jonathan M. Hethey,reading time: ~4 minutes

Best Cheap Linux VPS Hosting 2019

Where are VPS the cheapest, how many CPU cores, how much RAM and disk space do you get for the dollar? I've taken a bit of time and looked at those questions.

Currently I'm comparing the following providers:

If you know of a hosting servers I should absolutely include, please let me know! The data for the below charts are benchmarked with at least 10 samples and aggregated with a bit of node code. I've written more about the process in the end of this post.

Note: The labels don't show up right on all mobile devices, work on an improvement is pending.

Best 5$ VPS?

Let's first have a look at the 5 dollar tier for smaller projects or just learning your way around the Linux command line and basic deployment.

^ Sha 256 time, shorter is better

^ Bzip2 compression time, shorter is better

^ IO operations, more is better

^ file system write, shorter is better

We can see that Vultr and Digital Ocean lag behind on the 5$ plan compared to Linode. Especially on the io speed Vultr seems to have some trouble. Keep that in mind if you're going to run a very file system heavy project, for example video upload or streaming.

Best 10$ VPS?

Comparing the plans shows that you mostly get the same specs in the 10$ tier, 2GB RAM, one virtual CPU core and ~50GB of SSD space.

^ Sha 256 time, shorter is better

^ Bzip2 compression time, shorter is better

^ IO operations, more is better

^ file system write, shorter is better

The Vultr server shows overall higher CPU speeds (at times 3x the speed), which is surprising compared to the previous server. We might need to take into consideration that deploy hardware for the virtual servers and other instance loads on the host system may vary.

Best 20$ or 40$ Dollar VPS?

The 20 and 40 dollar plans are again very similar and show little variance even in available disk space or transmission bandwidth. If you get above this tier, dedicated servers might be more suitable for you, if you don't need exactly replication of hardware of similar magic

^ Sha 256 time, shorter is better

^ Bzip2 compression time, shorter is better

^ IO operations, more is better

^ file system write, shorter is better

In this segment, we can see Vultr leading the CPU bound tests and Linode following on second place. DO outperforms its own bigger spec VPS with the smaller instance.

General Notes on VPS Providers

I'm not paid by any of the providers to mention them or to say anything nice about them. While I do get "store credit" with them if you sign up with them, I couldn't care less which ones you try. For my sake: try all of them!

All so far tested virtual private server hosting companies have very user friendly UIs and make it incredibly easy and fast to spin up a server, which is exactly what you want when managing web infrastructure or just wanting to try them out.

Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean has a referral program.

DO also has Kubernetes hosting in a limited availability / beta stage.

There's a 15$ flexible VPS tier that let's you decide between 1-3GB of RAM and 1-3 CPU cores:

Locations:

America: New York, San Francisco, Toronto
Europe: Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London
Asia: Singapore, Bangalore

Linode

Locations:

America: Dallas, Fremont, Atlanta, Newark
Europe: Frankfurt, London
Asia: Singapore, Japan (Tokyo)

If you should try to mine XMR/Monero or other crypto currencies, their support will reach out to you and you will be expected to not do that. Their terms of service state:

Misuse of System Resources: Intentional misuse of system resources, including but not limited to employing programs that consume excessive network capacity, CPU cycles, or disk IO.

I know that the support will do that because a friend told me. No other reason. Really!

Linode has a referral program.

Vultr

Locations:

America: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, New York, Seattle, Silicon Valley ?, Toronto
Europe: Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Paris
Asia: Singapore, Japan (Tokyo)
Australia: Sydney

Their mascot is a cute little vulture.

Vultr has a referral program.

As one of the few providers, they offer servers in Australia.

How this vps benchmark was made

I'll quickly go over my toolchain for creating this post:

The amazing nench was used to actually run the benchmarks and test the performance of the different machines.
There's a small bash script that wraps around nench, captures the output and runs it 10 times
The data samples are parsed and aggregated with node and converted to JSON